You may have missed the fact that there is a Republican primary race for secretary of state. (Congratulations to you for not being a political junkie.)

Candidate Jay Schroeder wants to eliminate the office. Candidate Bill Folk wants to expand the office.

Folk sent out a news release that proves that either Folk or his staff needs to write better news releases. Folk starts by violating Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment by saying:

This morning Secretary of State candidate Bill Folk stated that he was not surprised with the Schroeder campaign announcement today that Schroeder would return a portion of the salary, “lets be honest here, Jay [Schroeder] is a politician with more gimmicks than substance. He offers the people of Wisconsin nothing by electing him Secretary of State,” said Folk.

Schroeder begs to differ:

The current incumbent of that office has been hunkered down in Madison for over 33 years with very little to do, and it is my goal to empower the voters of Wisconsin to determine the fate of this do-nothing office. …

Why not simply just eliminate the office if it has no useful purpose? Excellent question! Since the office of Secretary of State is a constitutional office the only way to eliminate the office is to amend the Wisconsin Constitution. As you can imagine, this is no easy task. This is why I intend to empower the voters of Wisconsin to have the option to eliminate this expensive and unnecessary office.

By giving you, the voters the facts, my hope is that you will use that information to contact your state senator and assemblyman and let them know that you do not want to spend over $1 Million a biannual budget to run an office with no important purpose.

Folk, the Racine County GOP chairman and member of the Village of Caledonia Plan Commission, accuses Schroeder, who ran against Rep. Dean Kaufert (R–Neenah) in 2012, of being a politician. That start is made worse by this non sequitur:

The Schroeder campaign is running on the elimination of the office, a duty that is in the hands of the legislature and the voters of Wisconsin not in the hands of the Secretary of State. He continues to state that we can reduce the budget by $1 million by eliminating the office but fails to take into account that the duties and costs will only be shifted to other areas of the government with no savings to the taxpayers and no recourse for the voters. …

Democrats stripped the Secretary of State of election responsibilities in the 1970’s due to the fact that Republicans controlled the office for nearly 30 years, Republicans did the same to Democrat Secretary of State Doug La Follette in the 1990’s and again in 2011 and 2013. “It is time to get past political expediency and return to a state of normalcy. In order to regain the proper balance we need to stop playing the gimmick angle and defeat Doug La Follette,” said Folk.

“Political expediency” is another term for “politics.” (“Normalcy” refers to a political state that happened in the halcyon past, which wasn’t really that great anyway, but is never coming back.) Democrats cut duties from the office because they didn’t like a secretary of state not from their party, and Republicans have done the same. Folk accuses Schroeder of exceeding his abilities to change the responsibilities of the secretary of state, and then proceeds to exceed his own abilities to change the responsibilities of the secretary of state.

Things get better when Folk’s webpage gives a then-and-now comparison:

In 1946 the Secretary of State of Wisconsin was responsible for the following: (Stats from NASS)
· Issue Corporate Charters
· Member of the State Land Board
· Member of State Board of Canvassers
· Administer Election Laws
· Register Trade Marks
· Custodian of Legislative Bills, Acts and Records
· Publish Session Laws
· Publish Abstract of Votes
· Attest Executive Documents

Under the 36 years of LaFollette here is what we are left with:
· Issue Corporate Charters
· Member of the State Land Board
· Member of State Board of Canvassers
· Administer Election Laws
· Register Trade Marks
· Custodian of Legislative Bills, Acts and Records
· Publish Session Laws
· Publish Abstract of Votes
· Attest Executive Documents

There is a growing call to eliminate the office – If the office is to continue to be held by Lafollete, I agree. However there is a better way…Vote For Folk.

You’ll notice that the Wisconsin secretary of state is not in charge of Wisconsin’s foreign policy. (Which is hard to believe, given the excessive political activism in Madison, that Wisconsin doesn’t have a foreign policy.) There is nothing on the current list, and arguably nothing on the old list either beyond possibly “administer election laws,” that justifies paying someone $69,000 a year — nearly three times the average Wisconsinite’s yearly income — for those duties.

I hesitate to put words in the mouths of dead people, but somehow I don’t think what Folk has in mind is in the spirit of this Reagan quote, which Folk uses in his news release and Schroeder uses on his webpage:

Ronald Reagan once said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!” Bill Folk wants to return vital responsibilities back to the elected office of Secretary of State by removing them from those unelected, unaccountable “government bureaus” established by the legislature.

One of those things is not like the other. I am all for keeping “unelected, unaccountable” government employees out of the political process. That, however, presumes in this case that what the secretary of state’s office does actually includes “vital responsibilities.”

The incumbent, Douglas La Follette, likes to fancy himself as a watchdog. La Follette, however, is unable to come up with any instance in which he served as a watchdog against the wishes of his own party’s leadership. La Follette was quite the opposite, in fact, when he illegally delayed publication of Act 10, the public employee collective bargaining reforms, to facilitate a lawsuit against Act 10 supported by his party. For that, La Follette should have been prosecuted and thrown out of office. I would be more convinced of the watchdog ability of either the offices of secretary of state or state treasurer if they were nonpartisan, but they aren’t. (And that wouldn’t guarantee anything anyway, given that the nonpartisan superintendent of public instruction is a toady of the teacher unions.)

Perhaps Folk should move a few miles south into Illinois, whose secretary of state has considerably more duties than Wisconsin’s. Of course, in Illinois, secretaries of state get elected governor, and then end up in the federal prison system for activities while they were secretary of state. (See Ryan, George.) Power corrupts.

Reagan’s comment that no government voluntarily reduces itself in size is answered by Reps. Tyler August (R–Lake Geneva) and Michael Schraa (R–Oshkosh). August and Schraa introduced a constitutional amendment last year to eliminate the office of secretary of state …

Earlier this year, Governor Walker signed Act 5, which repealed the Secretary of State’s duty to publish notices of new laws in the newspaper and eliminated his ability to selectively delay the publication of enacted bills like Act 10.  Currently, the only remaining duties of the Secretary of State are sitting on the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, as well as three other minor duties.

… and treasurer:

… the [2013–15] state budget reduced the Treasurer’s office to the sole duty of sitting on the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands.  In the wake of this change, current State Treasurer Schuller publicly stated that this lone duty amounts to “two 15-minute phone calls a month.”

Their proposed constitutional amendment fits my thinking. The lieutenant governor has only one main responsibility, but it is important: to replace the governor if the governor leaves office, by choice or otherwise. That has happened twice in my lifetime, when Lt. Gov. Martin Schreiber replaced Gov. Patrick Lucey upon the latter’s appointment to be Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Mexico in 1977, and when Lt. Gov. Scott McCallum replaced Gov. Tommy Thompson upon the latter’s appointment to be George W. Bush’s secretary of Health and Human Services in 2001. Three lieutenant governors became governor upon the deaths of their predecessors, and a fourth became governor after Gov. Fighting Bob La Follette became U.S. Sen. Fighting Bob La Follette.

The duties of the secretary of state’s and treasurer’s offices should be able to be folded into the lieutenant governor’s office for less money than the $5.5 million per year the two offices now spend. At a minimum state taxpayers would save the $138,000 the state treasurer and secretary of state undeservedly receive.